1739–1746
There was the man who had killed his father; the man he hated as only a child who had been robbed of the man he had worshipped could hate.
Now, they were about to hang the murderer, and he, James Marshall, had come to see the hanging.
He was among the strident thousands, most of whom had come to gape for the pleasure of hearing the condemned man’s peroration, for this newly made ‘hero’ would surely die with words of defiance on his lips, would die in the midst of his turbulent, pulsating, vibrant life; a man in whom there had once been the seeds of greatness.
And the seeds of evil.
The boy, who was ten years old on this fifteenth of September 1739, did not know but sensed these things; could not explain the thoughts in his mind or the thumping of his heart or the mist which sometimes covered his eyes.
James, son of Richard and of Ruth Marshall, had come not in vengeance but to see vengeance done. He had followed the carts containing the manacled prisoners from Newgate Prison, each sitting on his own coffin in the groaning, creaking tumbrel, and had watched when, with the others who were to be hanged, his father’s murderer had been half carried, half led into the alehouse to have his last free drink and make his last macabre joke.
Today there were two carts carrying seventeen condemned men headed for Tyburn. Most, by some strange miracle, behaved as if they were going not to their executions but to their weddings, although one youth, who could be no more than sixteen or seventeen, sat staring straight ahead of him. Most were dressed in their best or else in borrowed finery, but Frederick Jackson was by far the most resplendent. He wore a bright-green velvet coat with elaborate brown trimming, a nosegay of fresh flowers surely made by someone out of love for him, and breeches of bright-yellow velvet, the knees tied with multicoloured ribbons. In his two-coloured hat he had a huge white cockade, a silent declaration of his innocence.
In the cart with him, two were dressed already in their shrouds. Also in the cart was the Ordinary of Newgate, a prison chaplain concerned more in extorting confessions from each man so that he could publish and sell them tomorrow and in the weeks to follow. In between his pleadings for confessions were mechanical words of comfort, but wine was a greater comforter than any God this priest could conjure up.
As they had left the alehouse, the Bow Tavern in St. Giles, one of London’s foulest rookeries and a city of vice within the metropolis, Frederick Jackson had shouted to the mob: ‘Harken to me, fellow citizens! I am in the mood for singing. Who knows “As clever Tom Clinch. . .”?’
A roar of approval had cut across his words, and like a bandmaster he had used his hand as an imaginary baton and had led the singing:
‘As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling, Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling, He stopped at The George for a bottle of sack. And promised to pay for it on his way back!’
There, on the steps of the alehouse, the landlord had roared the words as loud as any. Even the hangman had chanted, and was smiling broadly now as he slipped the ropes over the condemned men’s heads.
On that mellow autumn day in 1739 the boy stood on the fringe of the milling crowd at Tyburn Fields on a rise in the stony earth from which were visible the carts and the gallows, the black-draped preacher and the victims. But the boy saw only Jackson, his dark head held back, sharp chin thrust upward and outward, the noose not yet tight about his neck. Between the boy and the murderer were the thousands of sightseers, yet he saw no one; not man or woman or suckling babe or skirt-clinging child. No seller of ballads or pamphlets telling of the dying speeches of rogues who had died this way before; no seller of oranges or chestnuts, of gin or beer, of coarse bread dipped in beef drippings or mutton fat; no seller of pasties or of tarts, black puddings or favours; none of the gentry and their ladies seated in the windows of nearby houses or on especially constructed stands near the place of execution. All were agog to hear what Frederick Jackson, whom many thought a bolder villain than Jonathan Wild, would say in the minutes left to him before the horses were thwacked and made to bolt, so that the cart was jerked from beneath his feet and he and the others were left dangling and kicking.
The boy did not really see the other condemned men. He saw no whores, no pickpockets, no stealthy probing hands; James Marshall, son of a murdered man, son of a thief-taker, son of a God, was vividly aware only of Jackson’s black head and, perhaps in wish-demanded fancy, Jackson’s flashing dark eyes, the bright clothes and the brave medals stolen from some dead hero.
He heard no single voice, but all the voices. The chants of the tiny religious groups that had come to sing and pray for Jackson’s soul, the shouts of the hawkers, the raucous voices of men whose hands were slapped from some pretty girl’s breasts or buttocks or, if the press were tight enough, from the warmth between her thighs. He did not hear the preachers calling on Jackson to repent or the dozens of men and women crying out: ‘Dying confessions, as written by the Ordinary of Newgate - one penny.’ These were true enough, although the confessions were not of today’s victims but those of the last mass execution, two weeks ago.
Suddenly, James saw the lips of the man he hated part, and, as if some magic had been cast, the noise ceased and silence fell, broken by one man’s voice, which made the silence seem even deeper.
‘Hear me all who have come here to watch me die, to see my legs kicking and my body tossing, hear me. Never in the history of Tyburn was such a monstrous crime committed, never a more innocent man condemned. . .’
Four people besides the boy listened with intensity which matched his although none knew the others - except that the boy’s mother was one of them. Each was present with a special purpose; each had come early and found a point of vantage. Each had waited with enforced patience, knowing that the hanging could not be over too soon or the people would scream their rage in disappointment and nothing was uglier or more difficult to control than a riot at a hanging on Tyburn Hill.
There were some people here who hated, many who feared, and one who loved the man who was about to die.
She was Eve Milharvey - the condemned man’s mistress; in all but name, his wife, as beautiful as the years could leave a woman in her thirties who had been ravaged by the brothels and the stink and the torment of London; a woman who, had she been carefully nurtured and protected and married to a man who respected even if he did not love her, would have been the mother of a family now and mistress not of a murderer, thief, cheat and fraud, but of a household.
But she had been born in a cottage behind a row of brothels in Westminster and her world had been one of filth and lust and brutality, of stealing from a man who had her willing mother pressed against a wall. At twelve she had known men and what they wanted and what they did. At thirteen she had found herself, alone, in a dark alley, on the edge of her world, surrounded by leering drunken men who all wanted their way with her and from whom she could not run because they hemmed her in while they peered at the black spots on thrown dice to decide who should take her first.
There was hardly a crime Frederick Jackson had not committed, hardly a savagery or brutality he had not exulted in, except one.
He had never taken a woman against her will.
He had succoured her.
His voice now was not loud, but was as clear as it had been on the night he had come upon her and the seven men tormenting her. She had not seen or heard him, heard only the triumph and the roar of the man who had ‘won’ her first, who pushed the others away from him and sent them, muttering and grumbling, to wait; a great hulk of a man whose weight would crush her. Already, he had one hand beneath her petticoats and another easing himself free of his breeches to take her.
A man had spoken in a quiet but carrying voice: ‘Release her, Matty.’ And when the man in front of her had taken no notice, had just fumbled and had nearly fallen on her, the stranger had called: ‘If you want to lie with a woman again, Matty let her go.’ And she had seen his face above the hulk’s shoulder and his hand on the big man’s arm. Suddenly, she had seen the winner stagger, had heard him swear, had seen him turn to strike the man who had dared to interfere.
‘Gawd!’ he breathed. ‘Jacker!’
On the instant all lust seemed to vanish from him; he turned and ran at a shambling gait towards the end of the alley. And all the others had gone. She was alone with one man who now stood looking at her from the height of at least six feet, as if studying every feature closely in the light of a fading torch. He put out his right hand and cupped her chin in the crutch between thumb and forefinger, slowly turning her face from left to right. At last, when she was facing him, he let her go.
‘Are you a whore?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she answered in a voice he could hardly hear.
‘Speak up, girl!’ His tone hardened as if her timidity angered him.
She drew a deep breath and answered more clearly, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘An honest whore,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Do you work for Moll Sasson or anyone else?’
‘No - no, sir.’
‘Speak up, girl!’
‘No!’ she almost shouted, not from courage or boldness, but out of fear. Moll Sasson controlled this area; nearly every prostitute paid her for both introducing customers and for protection against certain kinds of perverts.
‘Then whom do you work for?’
‘I - I work for myself,’ she answered.
‘A chit of a girl like you? Don’t lie to me.’
‘I am not, sir. I swear it, I work for myself.’
‘No bully? No twang?’
‘I’m nobody’s moll,’ she insisted, and her voice grew stronger, drawing some courage from the man. ‘I’ll take a man standing or I’ll take a man lying down but I won’t take his pouch and I won’t have a bully to take it or to protect me.’
‘Upon my soul, I’m inclined to believe you,’ he said, and laughed again. ‘Don’t you know what Moll Sasson would do to you if you were caught working on her territory?’
‘I - I wasn’t working here, sir. They set on me. They know I’m always alone.’
‘I can believe that too,’ he said, and took her arm, turning her towards the nearer end of the lane. ‘You take my advice. Never work on Moll’s territory. She’ll do a lot worse to you than those drunken oafs would have done; a breastless woman’s no pleasure to them. Where do you live?’ he added abruptly.
‘Where do you live?’ The meaningless question echoed inside her head.
In the gutters, in the alleys, in the taprooms and the brothels, in the fields, in a barge upon the river, in a warehouse, in a coal house; anywhere she could lay her head. Bent and crooked over the troughs or tubs outside in the bitter-cold courtyard, in the sewers with the rats.
The man stared down at her and she dared to look up at him.
‘Who are your customers?’ he asked.
‘Whoever comes by,’ she said.
‘Faugh!’ he barked. ‘You stink. When did you last have a bath?’ he asked her. ‘When did you wash all over?’
‘In May,’ she told him with near-eagerness. ‘In the river by the meadows at Chelsea.’
‘In May! Three months ago!’ He looked at her as if with new disgust, and she did not know what had displeased him. Suddenly he demanded: ‘Whom do you belong to?’
And she replied; she could hear her voice now, even fancied there was a ring of pride, pride in those days of such squalor.
‘Myself,’ she said. ‘I told you, sir.’
‘Speak up, girl. Whom do you belong to?’
‘I belong to myself, sir.’
‘M’God!’ he said in a voice which was half filled with laughter and at least touched with respect. ‘I believe you do.’ After a while he went on: ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Yes - yes, sir,’ she replied meekly. ‘If I please you.’
Cobbled lanes and cobbled streets, like the cobbles she stood on now, bare feet slipping, sore toes hurting, while he walked as if he were a king and it did not occur to him that she could not keep up such pace. Past dim-lit inns and dark closed houses, past decrepit old watchmen leaning on the poles they could scarcely carry, past a carriage and two horses close to Moll’s, past a flaming torch outside a bank, along a narrow lane to a flickering oil lantern over a doorway. She knew the place and now she knew him and could understand why her molesters had disappeared so quickly and without protest at his approach; why the man he had called Matty had released her so swiftly.
Up the narrow wooden stairs into a room twice as large as any she had even been in, along a passage with other rooms leading off. A woman, an old woman, saying: ‘Yes, Jacker, yes, Jacker, yes,’ obeying him literally, taking Eve into a small room which struck warm from a huge fire over which two caldrons of water shimmered and steamed, ordering her in a high-pitched voice to do just what he had already ordered.
‘Fill the bath . . . take off those filthy clothes . . . throw them on the fire. Throw them on the fire, you brat, or I’ll throw you onto it!’
Her only clothes. She dragged the heavy hip bath from a corner; she placed her hands at her skirt, which was loose at her tiny waist, while the heat stung. ‘Off with your clothes!’ Suddenly the old woman was on her, acting with much more strength than she seemed capable of, skirt off, petticoat, shift. She was being whirled about, hardly able to keep her balance, and in despair saw the hag throw her clothes into the fire where they blazed with blinding light.
How she had cried!
Copper pans full of hot water, cold water, mixed and bearable on her fair skin, heat from the fire, pain from a scrubbing, everywhere, everywhere; and suddenly, quiet and stillness, a chill blast from the door as it opened and Frederick Jackson came into the room.
She stared at him, covering her woman’s breasts with her child’s hands and half crouched so that the old woman scolded: ‘Stand straight, you ingrate! Don’t pretend a man’s never set eyes on you before.’
‘Leave her be,’ Jacker said, and the firelight made his face look half saint’s, half devil’s; filled her with hope and chilled her with fear. ‘Give her a cloak,’ he ordered. ‘Give her some food, and bring her to me.’
She had known so many men but had never before known gentleness, or the softness of a feather bed, or the lingering of kisses on her lips and places of such rare intimacy. And afterward, back in the room where she had been bathed, a meal with beef sirloin that he cut from a huge piece on a turning spit, bread, cheese, cabbage, ale, and a cake with whipped sweet cream. A fantasy.
The whole of London, perhaps the whole of England, knew her now; the girl who had enticed so many rich men into her embraces and into Jackson’s ruthless clutch; the girl who had made them so easy to blackmail. The woman who had grown more cunning and skilful in all the ways of her sex had never married and yet was forever Frederick Jackson’s woman. The woman who had grown in stature as he had grown in wealth and notoriety, laughing at her fears and scoffing at the threats of those who hated him.
‘Hang Jacker? Never fear, my love, they’ll never hang me.’
Perhaps - perhaps they would not have brought him here and placed the noose about his neck and listened in awed silence as a legend prepared both to die and to grow stronger; perhaps it would never have come to pass - but for John Furnival.
John Furnival, also, was surely here today.
She did not know for certain because she had not set eyes on the big, honey-blond man with the near-yellow eyes and the massive strength, and yet she felt quite positive. He would not miss this day of triumph, after twenty years of conflict between him and Jacker, a conflict already fierce when Jacker had plucked her from the cobbled lane and taken her to Loxley Yard, near Gray’s Inn and the fields, and claimed her for himself.
Most of the other condemned men were quiet now. One was calling on his nearby friends and relatives to rescue him; one, dressed in rich brown velvet and green shoes and hat, was tossing halfpence among the crowd, where the old and the young scrambled for them. Throughout Jackson went on talking in that carrying voice; it was as if he believed that for as long as he could talk, so he would defy the noose and the hangman and the men who had sent him here.
‘. . . among you here today are many thief-takers, justices, constables, each and every one of them more corrupt than I. Guilty of more crimes. Pariahs living off the people, living off you, the good, honest English people. . .’
A man near the platform shouted: ‘He’s right!’ Another, from the midst of the crowd, roared: ‘Hang them all!’ Roars of approval came from a dozen places; close to the platform a surge of people was carried forward, threatening, and from all parts of the crowd came cries of:
‘Cut him down!’
‘Free him!’’
‘Save Jacker!’
‘Hang the thief-takers.’
From close by John Furnival, who stood with only three of his own paid officers, there came other cries, deeper and more menacing:
‘Hang Furnival.’
‘Kill Furnival.’
‘Kill the devil.’
‘Hang him - kill him - cut his throat - cut off his head.’
Now the cry ‘Hang Furnival’ became a chant, taken up not in two or three, not in a dozen, but in a hundred places. Men and women turned to see him as he towered above their heads, the timid began to move to a safer distance, the bold ones cursed and screamed at him, while Frederick Jackson’s ruffians forced their way through the crowd towards him, ugly and menacing, harsh-voiced with hatred. The crowd divided to let them through. From the fringes many ran so that they could watch with greater safety while the cut-throats and the highwaymen, the thieves and the murderers, who got their living from Frederick Jackson or else were protected by him, pressed mercilessly on towards Furnival.
A small company of soldiers stood by the gallows, with the sheriff in charge of the executions, splendid in their bright-green uniforms and cockaded three-cornered hats, muskets grounded, sun glistening on long, narrow bayonets.
John Furnival saw the ruffians coming from all directions, saw the people near him scatter, knew how deeply they were afraid, knew that his aides would stay by his side even if they were cut to pieces trying to defend him. He had anticipated some such attack and had made arrangements with the sheriff. If it were possible, he desired to win this confrontation unaided; such a victory would be of great value in the future. Unless the sheriff ordered in the troops, few if any of the citizens of London would dare to help; most would prefer to see him hacked to death so as to be able to tell their children and their children’s children of the hideous sight they had seen on the day Frederick Jackson and John Furnival had died.
He stood tall and aloof, as if impervious to any danger, and with great deliberation took out his golden snuffbox and placed a pinch of snuff on the back of his left hand. In his ears the chant was ringing: ‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’
Slowly, he raised his left hand to his nose and sniffed delicately, an almost feminine gesture in so big a man. As the snuff went up his right nostril a single shot rang out, so sharp and clear that it echoed high above all other sounds, even the chanting which drowned the words spilling from Frederick Jackson’s lips.
Furnival’s movement had been his signal to the sheriff and the shot had frightened off those who would have attacked him.
Jackson was still haranguing the crowd.
‘. . . these are the guilty men, who batten on the poor, who drag the harmless whores into their courts and charge them for plying their trade, who. . .’
Suddenly, he stopped, for relatives and friends climbed into the carts to bid the condemned farewell, while the executioner and his assistants finished fastening ropes around the necks of those about to be hanged, then thrust them towards another huge cart over which the gibbet hung. Weeping and wailing now took over, drowning the voice of the Prison Ordinary, now chanting psalms, but nothing stopped the sellers or the performers among the crowd.
When the executioner covered the eyes and the faces of the condemned with black caps, Jackson kept trying to speak again but failed. The chaplains and the visitors were driven off, and then the executioner thwacked the horses fastened to the cart and they dashed away. There, kicking on the empty air, were seventeen human beings, soon to die. On the instant, some relatives pulled at the hanging bodies to hasten death, one belabouring a swinging man’s breast with a heavy stone to stop the heart from beating.
Jackson hardly moved; no doubt the executioner had been well paid to make sure his neck was broken.
The crowd’s attention switched now from the gangs forcing their way through to Furnival towards the victims, and there came a deep sigh, as if each person present drew in a breath at the same moment.
Eve Milharvey uttered a gasp and buried her face in her hands. James Marshall stared at the swinging man as if mesmerised by the sight. Ruth Marshall, for whose husband’s death this man had died, watched with swollen eyes in a face drained of colour, then slowly lowered her head and locked her fingers in silent prayer.
The soldiers looked on impassively. The Reverend Sebastian Smith, a small, plump and mild-looking man, invoked his God in tones which only those close by could hear for all whose souls had departed this earth.
‘Oh, Lord, have mercy on this man, Thy creature, spare him the fires of hell, take him to Thy bosom. . .’
His voice and all other sounds were drowned in the fresh chanting, in the noise of movement, as Frederick Jackson’s men fought to get at Furnival.
‘Hang, hang, hang Furnival.’
Furnival had not moved.
He raised his left hand again and sniffed the biting snuff into his left nostril, and almost on the instant there was a bark of command.
‘Quick - march.’
And from the direction of Hyde Park, from main roads and narrow side streets, came large numbers of dragoons, marching with their muskets at the ready. Furnival, as Chief Magistrate of Bow Street, had arranged their presence, rare at Tyburn, because he had been alive to the possibility of riot after Jackson’s death, or even before. The tramp, tramp, tramp of feet now echoed to the chanting, while from the crowd more of Furnival’s hired men moved with military precision and formed a ring around the magistrate.
Furnival looked towards the groups of men who had come to kill him. A stone struck his left shoulder but he did not appear to notice.
‘Go home, all of you,’ he called. ‘Go home and hold your wake and you’ll have nothing to fear this day. Stay and make more trouble and I’ll have every one of you in Newgate within the hour.’
Another stone glanced off his arm.
A man growled: ‘We’ll kill you one day.’
‘But not today,’ said Furnival, and he turned his back. ‘Go home.’
Not a single man approached him further; and as the men who had come to kill dispersed among the crowd so did Furnival’s men, watching for the more blatant pickpockets; and as the minutes passed, the festive air, which had been everywhere before the hanging, began to return; laughter came in spontaneous gusts; the sellers of food, of gin and of ale, those who offered all the fun of the fair, began to do a roaring trade; men and women and some children sprang up as if from the ground carrying sheaves of single printed sheets. These were the forged or fictional stories, some based on things Jackson had said in prison, but few cared to wait for the official one the Ordinary would produce tomorrow morning.
‘Last speech and dying testament of Frederick Jackson, his very words, from first to last, only twopence. Read all the things you couldn’t hear because of the din. Jacker’s own words, words you’ll never forget.’
And others hawked more newssheets and bills, whilst a few, with furtive air, began to offer pieces of the rope taken from Jackson’s neck; if genuine, each piece would fetch several pounds.
‘Death speech of Jonathan Wild, not a word missing, printed on special paper, only one penny.’
‘Who’ll buy The Daily Courant? Read all about the ‘orrible things that ‘appen in the Fleet. . .’
And so they went on, raucous and never-ending.
At one spot, eating hot pies and drinking lemonade, one family group was busy reading aloud pieces from the confessions while another was arguing amiably.
‘Tyburn’s the best place, I tell you,’ one man declared.
‘I like Newgate better; you don’t have so far to walk,’ the woman argued.
‘What’s the matter with Putney, then, or Kennington? You can take a coach to the gallows and watch everything without moving out of your seat.’
Others of the party began to join in, some preferring the hangings in the Old Kent Road and Wapping, some showing a liking for those outside a shop where a thief had been caught and summarily tried.
‘There’s a book I read,’ the first man said, ‘calls London the City of the Gallows. The author says you can’t come into London by road or by the river without passing some.’
A child, running, fell and began to cry and all thought switched from hanging to the scratches on his knee.
John Furnival, with his three close attendants, walked through the thinning crowd towards Tyburn Pike, where his carriage was waiting. As he neared a little mound which commanded a good view of the hanging, a lad dressed neatly in tweed breeches, a jacket which reached halfway down his thighs and a shirt with ruffles at cuffs and neck ran forward. His slouch cap, of hogskin, was pulled over his left eye. He wore heavy boots, patched at the toes, with thick nails already wearing thin. Before Furnival realised what was happening, the lad took his hand and pressed it to his lips. For a moment the magistrate stood still, aware of the cool lips and the upturned face and the dark curls and touched to emotion because of the lad’s fervour; something stirred in his memory, too, but before the vision grew clear, the boy turned and ran, choking back tears. Furnival strode on, pointed out by hundreds, until suddenly he saw a woman in a dark-grey cloak and black bonnet standing in his path and staring at him.
Again he stopped abruptly. The three men also stopped and put their hands to their pistols and looked about but no one who threatened danger stood nearby, unless the woman hid some weapon beneath the cloak she wore as a disguise.
Furnival said, ‘If you need help, Eve Milharvey, come to me.’
‘I’d sooner ask help of the devil,’ she said. ‘I hope you die in agony, John Furnival.’
She turned and walked away at a good pace, head held high, eyes still blazing with the hatred she had for the man who had hounded down her lover.
No one followed her or recognised her. She was near the creaking cart on which they were now taking Jackson’s body away, drawn by two heavily built farm horses, when she saw a boy. Had she seen him only full face she might not have been so startled or so sure who he was. His profile allowed no doubt at all; the high forehead and the dark curly hair; the hooked nose; the deep-set eyes which might have been carved from marble; the full lips, seen even from where she stood as bow-shaped and beautiful, lips more rightfully a woman’s than a man’s. And the square, thrusting chin, too large in comparison with his other features, making him jaw-heavy, as his father had been. She had seen him once before and recognised him as James Marshall.
His father had worked as a court officer for John Furnival, and had been one of three who had gone to arrest Frederick Jackson for a robbery he had planned and helped to carry out. Jackson might have escaped from that charge of robbery, although some of the stolen silver and coin was still in his home, the home in Loxley Yard to which he had taken her nearly twenty years ago.
But he could not escape the charge of murder. And he had shot Richard Marshall through the heart, not knowing two other of Furnival’s men had been outside the door, waiting to pounce on him when he came hurrying out.
And now here was James Marshall, watching the body of the man who had killed his father as it shook and shifted in the death cart.
And she, Eve Milharvey, felt no deep stirrings of compassion for him, even though she saw no hatred in his eyes but only tears.
He turned blindly, passed her, and ran towards Hyde Park and the turnpike there. Soon he was swallowed up in the crowd and she hurried and caught up with the people following the body, some walking alongside the cart as if they would be pallbearers. Some she knew; among them were the most vicious and cruel of the scoundrels who had looked up to Frederick as their leader.
A question which had often been in her head seemed now to burst inside her. Why had he led them? Why had a man of such calibre placed himself at the head of an army of brutes? What had driven him to the cruelties she knew he had committed when with her he had always been gentle and kind?
The horses’ hooves and the iron wheels clattered over the gravel, the ungreased hubs groaned in a journey to the burial place she had bought for him, just as she had bought the body and the clothes from the hangman, whose property they became. Most bodies were purchased by friends or relatives who could afford them; a few by the Surgeons’ Hall. Once there the surgeons would seize upon them in their greedy thirst for the knowledge which only fresh dead bodies could give. At least she could save Jacker that indignity. No one recognised Eve as she walked with her head bowed, the frills of her black bonnet drawn low over her forehead. Gradually, thoughts blurred and almost died away, but one remained: that more and more of the men who owed Jacker their lives and their livelihoods dropped out of the procession, a cortege fit for a caricature by Hogarth. Some stopped at a grogshop for a penn’orth of gin; some saw a face or a pair of eyes or a low-cut revealing dress and followed it.
Outside the tavern in St. Giles the hangman himself was auctioning pieces of rope, and even young girls were buying pieces and fondling them, putting them to their cheeks or down their bosoms. From inside, the sound of drunken revelry was at its height and the words of the song which Jacker himself had sung came clearly into the street, making Eve catch her breath.
‘He stopped at The George for a bottle of sack,
And promised to pay for it on his way back!’
Once, near the open space of Lincoln’s Inn, where lawyers lived and worked, she saw a boy and thought mistakenly for a moment that it was young Marshall. And once she saw a man with hair the colour of John Furnival’s, but a smaller man, large enough to remind her of her hatred of the magistrate but not, in her grief, to make it blaze to life.